As if there’s just two reasons for making a GIF; either you’re doing it for the lulz or for “marketing and education.” There should be other reasons to create, other than raising the humor level or expanding the knowledge of your product.

How’d I get around to reading about InVision? Tom Moody, who mentioned InVision’s “vision” for vid-based GIFs on his blog—and offering his own seven tips on how to make anti-fleek, GIFs that have nothing to do with marketing. Those tips, reprinted below.

1. Choose your targets wisely. Would this look more funny/stupid if broken?
2. Find an online image editor. Start messing around with the settings.
3. Does your broken GIF look too much like “glitch art” or “datamoshing”? Back to the drawing board. Avoid “art” cliches.
4. What is your purpose behind breaking the GIF? Are you making a philosophical point about entropy or is this just for “lulz”?
5. Who is your intended audience? Is it an art audience or a “funny junk” bulletin board? (Related to No. 4 above.)
6. Does the GIF really look broken or just badly made? (Think about that, too.)
7. Always pad listicles out to odd numbers.

(Above GIF by You Are Mean Computer; pretty sure it both makes a “philosophical point about entropy,” and lulz.)

On why ramen is dead: “The country’s noodle scene is currently awash in deeply porky broths and stifling homogeneity…which is the antithesis of ramen.” Sadly, no mention of instant ramen. [Grub Street]

Brooklyn’s waterfront has been invaded by Chinese developers. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration.) The Oosten, set to open in Williamsburg next year, will become the first solely Chinese-owned building to be erected in the United States. [WNYC]

Astronauts: stop littering. There are 96 bags of urine on the moon. [The Takeaway]

Expansion Notice: The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) has raised $330 for its $450 million capital campaign. Houstonians should be happy about some of the planned renovations which plan on making the campus more pedestrian-friendly. This from a city where people look at you funny if you’re walking instead of driving. [Glasstire]

Everyone is planning for motherfucking Valentine’s Day already. If you like boobies, and you live in Chicago, you can pay to go on a “Naked at the Art Institute Scavenger Hunt” tour. $41 will give you and a date all the boobs, balls, and buttholes on view in the museum. [Fleshbot]

El Museo del Barrio curator Rocío Aranda-Alvarado responds to our reporting last year on the Gramsci Monument. She advocates for a less cynical outlook on art in general, and views the monument as a community-based experience which goes “beyond the self”– “turning regular capital into social capital.” (At the time, skepticism about funding, colonialism, and the artist’s intentions surrounded the monument.) This, and other responses will continue on A Blade of Grass. [A Blade of Grass]

Here’s the supplement to the modern love story in the Times we linked to yesterday: It’s the set of questions you ask your partner to fall in love. [The New York Times]

Art critic Rodrigo Cañete has noticed that MoMA plans to sell a Monet to benefit its acquisitions fund. This is justified by a spokesperson who notes that Impressionism doesn’t fit the museum’s modern painting collection. [Taboofart]

Tom Moody has some thoughts on our blogroll and our recent statements on Ryder Ripps. Generally speaking, I think he gives critics a little too much power, but it’s good to hear the perspective regardless.[Tom Moody]

Moody also argues that Ripps’ “Art Whore” is “no more offensive” than Andrew Norman Wilson’s “Virtual Assistance Project,” a year-long mutual collaboration with a presumably low-paid overseas assistant, for art. This is unfair to Wilson, who worked extensively with his assistant Akhil and returned the favor by building a mini-plane and making a video, which Akhil requested. While this does not forward the assistant’s career, Wilson doesn’t align his own creative work with his assistant’s. He also doesn’t view him as a whore. [Tom Moody]

Margarine consumption happens to correlate almost perfectly with the divorce rate in Maine, and other random trends that correlate. This site is amazing. [Spurious Correlations]

At this point, 2014 is still a wash; trending words included “asphyxiation” and “misogyny”, but the most-typed phrase was an emoji heart. Naturally, we turn to GIFs. Here are the year’s “GIF of the Day” highlights, in creative standouts, minor cultural milestones, and mostly, things we couldn’t stop thinking about because they were so weird.

Our last post of 2014 is this Tom Moody-Seacrestceadle collaboration. On his blog Moody tells us that he made a “photoshop dot” version of a Venezuelan poodle moth drawing and Seacrestceadle animated the dots. Interestingly, the dots, even when animated, take on the feel of an image that went through a fax machine or a cheap computer printer. It’s a very lo-fi image, that for the record, looks a lot more like a rabbit to me, than a moth.

Left to my own devices, I’d probably always seek out the most ornate complicated GIFs I could find. It’s my taste. But after having spent most of the day writing up a soul crushing shopping guide for the rich, (I may never be rid of my anti-corporate teenage angst) Tom Moody’s modest set of GIFs serves as a well-needed palette cleanser. The mini-band above has all of zero relationship to art market, and can be evaluated for what they are; short animated loops of squirrels playing music. One plays an electric guitar, the other a banjo, with what appears to be the back of a player piano and a sheet holder in between the two. Banjo squirrel not withstanding, the movement of each GIF has been sped up or exaggerated in some, creating a bizarre caricature of the action. It’s cute, and perhaps a little naive, in exactly the right way.

Today’s GIF of the Day is an unplanned collaboration between artists Tom Moody, SeacrestCheadle and mrhealth. We’re on the road, so GIF commentary will be minimal. For now, we advise readers to simply enjoy the GIF.

The GIF shows just keep coming. Along with “Wallpapers” and “GIF Free For All”, we now can thank “The Limited Collection” for 33 new GIFS. Organized by the London/Berlin-based La Scatola Gallery, curators Rozsa Zita Farkas and Valentina Fois are rolling out one GIF a day, through the end of the month, on tumblr. The “limited” refers to the fact that come October, the GIFs will be taken down and archived in a limited edition version to be sold by the gallery. As Tom Moody (a participating artist) points out on his blog, “The GIFs will continue to circulate on the internet and elsewhere, depending on whim and circumstance, thus avoiding the public relations gaffe of ‘taking the GIF offline so the collector can have it locally’ (which one institution attempted a while back).” Good. It doesn’t answer the question of whether collector audiences have a sterilizing effect on the medium, though; Paddy Johnson suspects that art fair trends are seeping into the GIF world already.

Anyway, “The Limited Collection” has been running since the end of August, so naturally, this provides us with the basis for another awards ceremony!

This time, highlights are selected for upholding the special weirdness that’s native to the art form. Above, you’ll see Viktor Timofeev’s “Synergeticka”, virtual reality gloves with little hands that come out of the fingertips. As you can see, they seem to be designed for the sole purpose of tickling an orange. I personally find this horrifying.

And then there’s Lawrence Lek’s “Shiva’s Folly”, presumably named for the Hindu god of great benevolence and destruction. I am no expert on Hinduism, so I defer to the wiki description: “At the highest level Shiva is limitless, transcendent, unchanging and formless”. I prefer to think of it as the moment in Ghostbusters when Gozer demands: “Choose the form of The Destructor!”

“If there was ever an academic space that combined a Woodstock party sensibility with the clever pragmatism of an indelible business magnate, it was the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s.” But how can we learn more about this time? Portrait photographer Michael Jang has one answer. He’s been releasing the photos he took as a student during that time on Instagram. So cool. [Nerve, Instagram]

Summer sure was short lived. We’re already back to talking about record breaking auctions. This week, 26 artists in the Phillips’ “Under the Influence” broke auction records. [Artnews]

The Getty Foundation has announced the first awardees of their Keeping it Modern program, which provides support to conserve modernist architecture. [Hyperallergic]

Jackson Pollock’s former home in the West Village is available for purchase at a mere $1.25 million. [Artnet]

The Times has released their Fall Art Preview in the form of a new interactive feature. A few ridiculous art pick in here—the mind numbing exhibition David Bowie Is, for example at the MCA but overall it gives one a good sense of what’s going on across the country. [The New York Times]

Looking at novelty cameras and fun back in 2000, Steven Stern writes, “Even though most of these cameras are analogue, low-tech devices, the model here would seem to be the Internet – these pictures are not exhibited so much as posted. They don’t end up in a photo album, on a shelf, or in a frame in a gallery, but in some real-life equivalent of virtual space. Like the personal website, the wall of Lomographs and the teenager’s bedroom filled with i-Zone stickers function as open records of the everyday, celebrations of the unexceptional. Not the special ‘Kodak moments’ of conventional photography, but non-events made visible. Disappointing perhaps, but fun.” [Frieze]

With a Hello Kitty retrospective coming up at the Japanese American National Museum, a Hello Kitty scholar has stomped all over the dreams of kawaii-eyed youth by revealing hat Hello Kitty is not a cat: “She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat.” In sum, Hello Kitty and Garfield belong to two different cartoon genome pools. [Culture: High & Low]

Russell Page’s garden at the Frick is being demolished to make way for the upcoming expansion. The Frick claims that the garden, once hailed by the New York Times as one of Page’s “most important works,” was never meant to be permanent. As a 1977 press release shows, though, this is a flat out lie. Who knew the Frick could be so controversial. [The Huffington Post]

If several thousand dollar easter egg hunts disguised as art are your kind of thing: ArtistMichael Sailstorferburies gold bars at the Folkstone triennial at high tide and waits patiently for low tide. At that point finders will be keepers. From a statement to the Guardian by Triennial curator Lewis Biggs: “I think we might well have a lot of people.” [The Guardian]

Adrian Searle has the review of the Folkstone Triennial. There’s a discussion of the Sailstorfer piece, a round-up of works Searle liked, and some complaints about Yoko Ono and Andy Goldsworthy. Meh. [The Guardian]

Ben Lerner’s new novel, 10:04, gets a thumbs up in the New Republic, and I can tell why. This narrator in the novel writes 10:04 as you’re reading it, and there’s scenes that blend non-fiction and sci-fi nearly seamlessly, like one where the protagonist starts having visions while walking along the High Line after eating a plate of hallucinogenic octopus. [New Republic]

Some notes on gigantic rabbit breeds: the now-extinct Minorcan King of Rabbits, due to its weight, was unable to hop. [Modern Farmer]

Hissbitch published “5 worst net artists” for Christmas last year, and at the time, blogger Tom Moody predicted the post would be deleted, just as their “10 worst net artist” post. We ran across Moody’s post again yesterday, and as predicted the Hissbitch post was deleted. So too is Hissbitch, which now seems to be taken over by Chinese characters. [Tom Moody]

Glenn Ligon in association with MZ Wallace has created a tote bag to benefit the Studio Museum in Harlem. [MZ Wallace]

Season seven of ART21 will showcase a topic that’s been close to us on the blog. For the show’s debut episode, they followed Thomas Hirschhorn around to discuss the Gramsci Monument at Forest Houses, described as “a new kind of monument that, while physically ephemeral, lives on in collective memory.” That episode premieres Friday, October 24 at 10:00 p.m. ET. [ART21]

It’s hard to say why I like this 2011 GIF by Chris Shier (who made the cubes and found the dashboard), Juan Amaya (who layered them), and Tom Moody (who GIFed them). It reminds me of the terrifying Internet nightmare/driving sequence in the first thirty seconds of Ryan Trecartin’s I-BE AREA. I don’t think that’s the level of critical analysis Moody might want from GIF of the Day, but for GIFs that made to be distracting, disorienting, and seamless, then this one does the job.